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September 12, 2006

Nancy Drew And the Mystery Spaces

I moved over to this neighborhood in 1999. At that point half of the Delmore building was boarded up like a Ghost town and the other side was occupied by a few galleries. At the very end you could find El Batey Market, a place where neighborhood kids scored candy and mothers could put it on their tab. In the seven years I've lived and worked in this building I have had the pleasure of seeing El Batey owner Evalia almost every day. She has shared her amazing enchiladas, saved packages for me and given me lovely Xmas gifts. In return I've styled her for a fab Flapper party & given her fun surprises.
This corner that Chango coffee House now shares with Evalia was once known as Chicken Corner. Chicken Corner was named after an Aaron Donovan mural that showed a bunch of crazy chickens. Bulging eyed chickens, one of them in leather, multicolored, painted and occasionally tagged and otherwise assaulted. (At one point someone tossed about a quart of tan paint over it and at least one of the chickens disappeared forever.) The mural was titled, “Moron.” When the Chango coffee house opened in 2004, its owners blasted out the mural in order to create a window on the side of the building. Pieces of it are mounted inside the coffee house in a sort of mosaic homage-slash-apology to the people who wanted the mural to stay. The day that Aaron moved out of his art space Delirium Tremens, he gave me all the pre-sketches of the Chicken Corner mural. I was honored.

Ok- so this leads me to the mysterious discovery today...

My neighbor came up the stairs today with an ancient embossed floral leather belt that seems salvaged from the Shakespeare era. I gasped as she revealed her husband found it at the hidden junk shop behing El Batey and Chango spaces. WHAT!?
How could a thrifty junk shop not be sniffed out by me and my pals?
We've lived and worked here a few years shy of a decade and no one ever mentioned the tiny antique space tucked behind my home? What will we discover next, an amusement park under the building attatched to a bowling alley? Hidden tunnels to the lotus flowers? I asked Evalia today about it and she simply said, "ah yes, my brother in law once owned the place for 15-20 years and he passed a year and half ago and his son is cleaning it out." Sometimes you have to really explore.
Speaking of mysterious spaces here in Echo Park- what is with that enigma glass box across the street from the Delmore?
Well rumor has it that the young girl who lives there told a source that her uncle builds fences and doors and created this front yard piece as a display of his craftmanship. Hmmm. I had hoped it was a time machine or an elaborate aviary.

Comments

the Korean family who build and toil in the wee hours welding and sautering and screaming at each other at 3 am as if its 3 pm you mean? haha- yes, as you know my living room is directly opposite their yard and I like to think the large telephone booth shaped box with windows on all sides they have been welding and working on for going on 3 months or so now in the front yard is a teleportation device to go to other galaxies.
When it was the crazy heatwave around 115 and still nearly 100 at night, i think you were out of town and yes, they were still up and at it welding and working frantically making their teleport box and dreams of travelling beyond the realms of the known universe a reality.
ps- you told me earlier about the secret thrift shoppe on the Delta St. side of the building and I am still like WTF? how the hell did we not catch wind of this and why would they not want us fools with are clearly so soon parted with our money to not know?
???

Orchide--
seriously whats going on over there-? that porch is gonna cave from all the piles of stuff. My other theory was that they made the glass box in the yard for the lil old grandma who hits fruit out of the trees with poles.

its definitely something going on (to quote some Frida for you).
Those lil kids are wide awake and playing games in the yard and racing around at 4 am consistently. They have vans that pull up to their sparkly brand-new stainless steel gate only in the middle of the night and they let the van in and then take loads and loads of stuff into the house.
The old lady maybe is filling the teleportation box up inside with lemons and shit so she can take them to Pluto and sell them to Plutoans. wait tho...Pluto is just a rock now. well, you get my gist.

that scares me frankly.
it makes me think of that creepy movie where there are people living underneath the floorboards of this house and the family never knew it...or this X-Files episode called "Home" where this family is inbred and the mama is just a torso and they keep her on a rolling mechanic's board hidden away under the bed...okay, I don't know exactly what the X-Files bit has to do with the maze per say but its spooky weird shit going on here below us in the Del Mor right where we live and enough is enough...get out ye damned cellar dwellers and stop spooking me and my folk...RAWRRRRRR!